Coffee and the Kiwi
Coffee is believed to originate in Ethiopia in the 13th century, but the history of how that happened is a story for another day. Today we want to look at how coffee migrated to our little country at the bottom of the world and became such an important part of the Kiwi culture.
We used to be a tea drinking nation, likely because of English colonisation, however our coffee obsession really started with the Second World War and the influx of new cultures and traditions in our cities. The predecessor to our integral café culture was the milk bar, a concept created during prohibition America and gaining popularity in New Zealand with the stationing of American troops during WWII. At the time New Zealand coffee usually only meant coffee essence in hot milk!
These milk bars then turned into coffee houses, or modern cafés, in the 1950s with the influence of post WWII European immigrants. Like younger siblings, our Kiwi cafés sought to imitate their European counterparts in style and décor, sophistication, exotic new foods and the introduction of Italian espresso machines. Our coffee began to develop with the immigration of European people who had grown up with fresh coffee and wanted to be able to replicate it in New Zealand.
Essentially, these new coffee houses were very similar to the local pub. They were open during the day and into the early hours of the morning and became a gathering place for artists and academics. They also changed our social behaviour away from alcohol in public bars where women were not welcome, to inclusive coffee lounges.
Today, instant coffee company, Nestle, states that New Zealand has the highest per capita consumption of instant coffee worldwide. We are clearly obsessed with coffee! It isn’t surprising, given how long the history of instant coffee in New Zealand dates back. In fact, David Strang applied for a patent for his ‘soluble coffee powder’ in 1889, far before the café coffee culture of the 1940’s. The espresso machines of the 1950s had mostly fallen into disrepair by the mid-1960s and instant or filter coffee became widely drunk.
Nestle, a Swiss multinational food and drink processing corporation and the largest food company in the world, began exporting instant coffee to New Zealand in 1958. Our dedication to coffee was so much that they then established an instant coffee factory in Wiri, Auckland, in 1962! (Instant coffee is now shipped from the Australian factory to New Zealand).
After a brief attempt at expresso machines, in the 1980s and 90s they became more accessible and established themselves in New Zealand. Today espresso machines are so integrated in our culture that they are on our kitchen benches, every café and restaurant. Our schools even offer students the opportunity to earn NCEA credit points in barista training.
Coffee has become such a part of our culture that instant coffee is no doubt in almost every pantry in every house, community hall, church, office and meeting place in the country. We took the coffee and the café culture from overseas but have developed it so that it is definitely Kiwi through and through.